by David Poyer
“Aye, sir. Sir, did Mr. Ohlmeyer tell you about mount fifty-one?” Packer nodded. “He asked for some of my men. I lent him three, and I’m going down there now to take them out on deck.”
“Very well,” the captain said. Dan swallowed and turned to go.
“Dan.”
He turned back instantly. “Sir.”
The hand weighted his shoulder. “But remember what I said. Make sure they wear life jackets. Rig your safety lines tight. I’ll try to maintain this course, but if I have to alter while you’re out, I’ll sound the foghorn.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go, Lenson!”
Just before the door closed, he heard the captain say, “Rich, I relieve you. I have the deck. It sounds like they need you down there more.”
He didn’t hear the weapons officer’s reply.
* * *
HE let himself out the starboard wing, and caught his breath.
The wind was lashing up a dark stampede. In the faint flashes and gleams the topside lights sent into the sea, he saw it heaving and bulging in terrifying splendor.
Looking out on it, like the world before land was created, tortured with the pangs of birth, he realized he might not see daylight again. Packer was determined to make easting. If they didn’t get enough ice off her, she wouldn’t recover from the next roll. She’d keep going on over. Capsize, and sink. What was the water temperature? Thirty-eight degrees. Sea water froze at 27.5.
If Ryan went over, he’d die long before dawn.
Drawing a shuddering breath that seared his mouth and nose, he pulled himself aft along the handrails. The ice was slick and wet and thick under his boots. He came to the Asroc deck and stopped, his head suddenly empty, looking at the men working between the stacks.
No, goddamn it, he wanted to go to the forecastle. He reversed direction, cursing his fatigued brain, and clattered down the ladders again and went forward.
On the main deck, Rambaugh and two seamen were uncoiling lines in the partial shelter of the port breaker. Dan didn’t see Norden yet. He missed him. He needed somebody to tell him what to do. But now the men were looking at him expectantly.… “Captain’s going to hold this downwind course while we get the ice off,” he shouted over the din of the storm. “We’ll try to get that mount battened down, too. Popeye, where’s these men’s life jackets?”
“We don’t need no life jackets, sir. It’ll just hamper them hanging on.”
“I want life jackets on them.”
“Sir, I don’t think—”
“Goddamn it, nobody goes out there without a jacket! Including you!”
“Get ’em, Rocky,” Rambaugh told Greenwald. Aside, as if to himself, he muttered, “They go overboard in this sea, life jacket won’t do them no damn bit of good.”
Dan ignored him. He let the wind flatten him against the bulkhead, and grabbed a coil of line and made one end fast to a stanchion. When the life jackets came up, he pulled one on, yanking the tie-ties so tight they hurt.
Norden pushed his way through the door and found himself a niche in the breaker. He made no move toward the jackets. “Stand by for heavy rolls to port,” said the 1MC, but the words were blown away almost instantly.
The bow began to come around, slowly at first, then with great swiftness as the wind caught it. Dan stared into the night. With the spray and darkness, it would be hard to see an oncoming sea from the bridge.
The wind slackened, cut off by the deckhouse as they came around. “Here she comes,” shouted Rambaugh in his ear, almost deafening him.
The sea towered above them and collapsed on the turning ship broadside. She faltered, tilted, and did not come back. Dan stared down into the water. It glinted with shattered bits of red sidelight. It surged up over the deck edge like a vicious dog and snapped at his knees. One of the seamen screamed, then stopped; he looked shamefaced around at his fellows.
The ship crept back a few degrees, then reeled to another long sea. Again he felt horrified at her weakness, her sluggishness. Don’t ever complain about a ship rolling again, somebody remote joked inside his head. The faster she rolls, the stabler she is.
Working lights came on on the deckhouse, making the flooded forecastle brilliant as a stage. Rambaugh swung a wrench and knocked two dogs off the breaker door with powerful underhand blows. “Stand clear,” he shouted, the words almost inaudible in the roar of the sea.
Dan looked at Norden. The weapons officer was crouched in the corner, blinking in the sudden light, staring out at the water that boiled across the forward deck like scalded milk. His face was pallid as the icy foam.
“Sir, I’ll go first,” bawled the second-class, right in his ear.
“No, hold it here till I get the safety line rigged,” shouted Dan. “Crack the hatch, Popeye.”
When the last dog popped free the door slammed open in their faces, releasing a wall of spray and a freak wind that blew both men back a few steps. Rambaugh made as if to go through. Dan pulled him back. He bent, gathering the line behind him, and leapt.
The forecastles on Gearing-class destroyers were wet even in moderate seas. Now Reynolds Ryan’s was a welter of water over slick ice, slanted, at that moment, at about thirty degrees. He coasted forward a few steps, sliding helplessly on the glassy surface, then crashed into the outboard lifelines as she rolled sluggishly to starboard. She was yawing, too, as if it was harder to steer with the seas astern. When he looked back, hail stung his face like icy BBs. The wind was a frozen fist in his teeth. It pressed his eyeballs into his head. A hundred knots in gusts, he thought. He threw his arm over his face, sucked a breath, skated forward a few more feet.
The gun mount gave him a lee. He rested for a moment, feeling the cold like pincers on his cheeks, then gathered himself again and clawed his way on all fours across the slanted deck. Forward, all the way forward, as the deck surged upward and then sawed dizzyingly down. He had to grab the ground tackle to keep himself from floating off, like an astronaut on a space walk.
He was almost to his goal when a sea detonated over the gunwale, drenching him instantly to the skin. But this was the old easterly swell, dwarfed now by the storm surge from the south. It died, subsiding in a roar of blistering cold spume that crackled away aft, and he scrambled the last few feet to the mooring tackle. He lashed the line around a link of chain with wooden fingers. Rig your safety lines tight. He undid the knot and turned and hauled hard and made it fast again.
Greenwald and Rambaugh joined him, making their way out hand over hand along the line. A moment later, Lassard and one of the gunners followed, mattresses and blankets rolled under their arms.
He left the wildcat and slid aft to the mount again. It was stove in, all right. Below the barrels, holes gaped in the experimental fiberglass shield. Cross that bright idea off, he thought. Under the squatty BM2’s whiplash voice, the men stuffed them first with blankets, then lashed the mattresses on top of them.
Dan looked around, noticing for the first time that Norden hadn’t come out with them. Ryan was stern to the worst seas now and they had it gentler up forward, though the wind shrieked and howled around them, lashing their faces like a sandblaster as they worked.
When the mattresses were in place, Greenwald ran round and round the mount paying out line. Dan found himself beside Lassard, both of them hauling as hard as they could on the free end as Rambaugh and the gunner went to lash it in place.
He was standing there braced, the line icy in his hands, when he saw something gleam for a moment against the black waste ahead.
“What’s that?” he screamed.
“What?”
The ship sagged to a trough. He flung out his arm. Lassard looked along it. Dan narrowed his eyes to a crash of spray, peering out over the bullnose.
“Ain’t nothing there—”
“Christ, help us,” Lenson muttered. He straightened, turning his back to it, lifting his head to the brilliant glare from the range light. Letting go of the line, waving his arms like
a madman, he shouted up wildly to the bridge. His voice was a faint piping in the blast-furnace roar of the storm, whipped away instantly over the black waste between them and what lay ahead.
There were two men on the wing, but they weren’t looking his way. The captain and Talliaferro. The chief engineer was pointing aloft, to where the huge SPS-40 air-search antenna was rotating. Their backs were to him. He screamed it again, despairingly, ripping his throat open.
“Ice! Ice! Dead ahead!”
The port lookout dipped his binoculars. Dan couldn’t see his face. He had on a cold-weather mask. But he saw the glasses steady on him; saw them lift, and look beyond.
The lookout stiffened, and the next moment was grabbing clumsily for his mike. Dan turned forward again and stared.
The glowing mass lifted slowly, no more than a quarter mile ahead of the open oval of the bow chock. As the ship heaved he could see it plain, a huge patch of milky white. The seas seemed to slide around it, leaving it almost motionless, as if even its buoyancy were negated by its tremendous mass. As he watched, it rolled, with ponderous slowness, exposing a vast curved belly, then subsiding, covering its white teeth again beneath the lightless lips of the sea.
“Jesus,” Lassard said beside him.
The foghorn went off, a deep shout that underlay the polyphonic shriek of the gale. The men stared forward, as if gathering themselves, then scrambled slipping back over the ice-littered deck. Dan looked after them, then at the line he and Lassard gripped. Unsecured, it would whip away in a moment. He remembered the gaping cracked shield. Another few waves into that, more tons of water …
“Lenson! Slick!”
The ship was vibrating beneath them, beginning her turn. He glanced back, to see Rambaugh and Greenwald waving them back to the shelter of the breaker.
He looked forward again. Too late to run now. He had time only for one swift turn of the line around himself and the seaman and another around the lowered barrel of the gun.
“We’re staying,” he howled.
The prow turned away from the floe. It slid down the port side, rolling slowly in the confused sea. It glowed, giving back the light that fell on it. No monster, no more than a couple hundred feet across, but plenty big enough to gut a destroyer.
Ryan leaned slowly, coming beam to the seas now. She groaned and lay over as the first swell burst over her. He clung to the line desperately, his feet sliding as the lean increased.
Lassard was screaming in his ear. “What?” he shouted.
“You’re fucking crazy—”
“We’ll be clear in another minute or two. Then the captain will come back—”
“Forget that shit,” screamed Lassard. “Look out there.”
He wiped his arm across his streaming eyes and stared out into the darkness.
Ryan was listing to port, blotting out the sea to starboard with the upraised deck, but he saw a black line above it, beyond the lights.
Bowditch said it happens, some remote part of his mind whispered. Sometimes, when systems intersect, two seas will add, a freak wave the sum of their two heights. Fifteen plus thirty—but that would be forty-five feet—
Ryan rolled slowly back, and he saw it plainly. Blacker than the night, too huge to estimate or believe, it towered over the old destroyer like a falling building. It was higher than the 02 level. Staring up in horror, he realized it was higher than the stacks. Behind a beaded curtain of spray, its peak towered above him for an endless frozen second, a solid curved wall, its face glittering like an obsidian mirror that gave back for an instant the lighted windows of the bridge, weirdly curved, and the emerald glow of the starboard sidelight.
It collapsed, roaring onto the Asroc deck, staggering Ryan, and broke over the pilothouse and forecastle, submerging them. Squeezed down by tons of roaring water, pressed tight into steel, he felt the line cutting into his ribs, felt Lassard’s body by his side. His open eyes stared into a swirling, airless blackness.
When it broke away, he still could not breathe or move. The cold seemed to have stopped his heart. He hung there, gasping, and then a fist thudded into his back and he coughed and caught a breath.
They took two more seas, smaller ones, before the ship labored clear of the floe and came left again and steadied up. Then he felt hands on his shoulders, arms pulling the lines free. He staggered back, panting through a face he could no longer feel.
Rambaugh yanked the last knot tight and grabbed his arm. “You okay?” he shouted.
Dan nodded.
“Think she’ll hold?”
He stared at the line. It was hard to move his eyeballs, as if they’d frozen in their sockets. He mumbled, “If it doesn’t, we’ll do it again.”
“I don’t want to come back out here, sir.”
“You got that right, Popeye.”
He waved weakly, gesturing the men forward. The foghorn boomed out once more. Bloch was shouting, his curses carried forward by the wind. They came out, carrying their tools and hoses, and in the next minute the clang of steel and the hollow roar of the steam hoses sounded again all over Ryan’s topsides.
He found himself next to Lassard. “Good job, Slick,” he gasped. “Thanks.”
The blue eyes were ferocious and brilliant. His mouth came close to Lenson’s ear. “Next time you decide to play hero, shithead, leave me the fuck out.”
Dan pushed himself away. Seeing a gap on a hose, he bent to add his strength to his men’s.
* * *
TWENTY minutes later, Packer passed the word for all hands to take shelter inside the skin of the ship. Dan was in the hangar, squatting with the exhausted, frozen seamen when the captain tried again to bring her around to the east.
Ryan didn’t snap around this time. This time she oozed, as if the Arctic Sea had turned to oil. The men grew quiet as her pitching lessened, then grew into a long-period roll. Boxes and crates shifted uneasily in the near-dark. Coils of spare line and hose leaned out from their lashings in the overhead.
Dan squatted on a Yokohama fender next to Bloch and Isaacs. In the dim light of the spaced bulbs in their little glass jars, he saw that the chief’s face was tattooed. When he looked again, it looked as if it had been stenciled in blood. “It’s the spray,” said Bloch. “Busts the blood vessels under the skin. You got some of it, too.”
He touched his face.
“Captain, he going to try coming ‘round again now, that it?” asked someone across from them. Gonzales, by his accent.
“Fucking-ay, Speedy,” said Lassard’s voice from the creaking dim. “Going to keep bashin’ her head into the wall till he turns us the fuck over.”
“Put it back in the box, Slick,” said a dark voice. “We heard ‘nough out of you.”
“Ay, fuck you, man.”
“Fuck you, needledick! You fuckin’ no-load shit-for-lunch!”
“Hey, you two silver tongues go fuck each other, aw right?”
“Who say that? Those be your dyin’ words, man.”
“Don’t let your mouth write any checks yo’ ass can’t cash, muh-fuh.”
“Put a lock on it, Lassard,” said the first voice again. “You make me tired, you talking alia time. You fuckin’ potheads is like turds. Ought to be forcin’ you out, not forcin’ you in.”
“What I’m worried about is getting locked in these troughs,” Bloch muttered.
“Locked in? We just turn out of them. Like we did before.”
“You need power for that, too, sir. I knew a guy was on the Dewey, out in the Philippines in ’44. They rolled so bad, they lost lube-oil suction and steering. They could only make five knots on one shaft. They were stuck in the trough for three hours, damn near went over.”
They fell silent again as the roll lengthened. Dan counted. Eleven thousand, twelve thousand, thirteen thousand. She rolled to the right, the wind howled, and she trundled slowly over to the left. He counted, feeling his heart shaking his chest. Thirteen thousand, fourteen thousand, fifteen thousand—
�
�She’s not coming back,” a voice yelled in the sliding, banging dark.
Ryan toppled over, not all at once but with agonizing slowness.
Someone shouted to the dark, “God, bring her back!”
A hatch or a door came open to starboard, and suddenly water was cascading in.
Dan thought, This is it. The waves knock her down and the wind holds her there till she dies. He’d never see the baby, never even know whether it was a boy or girl.
Isaacs said, “If we goes over, there anybody around to get us, Mr. Lenson?”
He thought about telling him there was. Then he thought, better stick with the truth. He said quietly, “Nobody I know of. But I don’t think we’ll any of us suffer too long.”
The ship shuddered under them. He felt the rumble of the screws racing at full power. It wouldn’t help, not on this course. No amount of power would.
Then he felt her stern start to rise. They grew heavy and then light. The hangar seemed to spin.
Ryan sagged back two or three degrees to starboard. She gave a deep groan. The screws faltered, then raced suddenly, shaking her stern like an arrow held by the tail. The deck rose again and came back a few more degrees.
Ryan straightened up under them with a rumbling sigh, and the wind rose again to a terrifying whine.
“Thanks, Lord,” somebody said out loud, and there were mutters of agreement, some of it profane.
Dan wondered whether Packer had given up. Then he knew it was foolish even to wonder that. The phone behind him squealed. He picked it up. “Lenson.”
“Dan? Rich. Get your guys out on deck again. We got to get more of this ice off.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Just to let you know, because it’s your space: Captain’s told DC Central to prepare to flood the chain locker.”
“Aye, sir.”
* * *
THIS time, Packer gave them half an hour. In thirty minutes of furious effort, the men got the last of the ice stripped off the 01 level, and started on the top of the hangar.
Dan was turning to with them, swinging one of the scarred-up bats, when he saw two men climbing the mainmast. Ohlmeyer and Heering were feeling their way up it with lines and chipping hammers like climbers up the face of a narrow glacier. The gunner’s mate had an olive-drab haversack on his back. He realized after the second look that it must be one of the demolition charges.
